I am an urban educator in New Jersey with many, many years of experience. Regrettably, for my own professional welfare, I cannot share any more than this regarding my identity.
You should know that I care deeply about each and every one of my students.
You should know that I have seem egregious changes to our educational system during the course of my tenure as a professional educator.
You should know that the overall purpose of this blog will be to provide an ongoing commentary on the current state of education in America, and specifically in New Jersey.
And now to the topic at hand:
What constitutes the fair and correct education of a child? We as an educational community ask a lot of parents: we ask them to entrust us daily with their most sacred investment- their child. What, then, as an educational community are we doing to properly, conscientiously, and productively engage students in the process of learning?
The human mind is the single most complex organ known to humankind. It is capable of rationality, emotion, and a whole host of other very advanced processes. By its nature, the brain is designed to learn. From my perspective, people come into life with an innate curiosity that yearns to know more about ourselves and our world. As educators, it is not so much an adding as a taking away: we don't have to do anything to motivate students, but rather we have to remove the bureaucratic, systemic, deeply conditioned obstacles to the intrinsic motivation which is present inside of each student. By doing so, students re-awaken to their natural intellect and curiosity about the world. I am not claiming that this is a quick, easy task: as with so many human processes, it may unfold rapidly and readily, or more slowly. However, my basic assumption as a classroom teacher is that people are intrinsically motivated, and it is our job as teachers to try to remove as many obstacles as possible which interfere with that innate function of the human mind.
Every educational experience in the classroom and in the larger context of a school should promote the purpose of motivating, engaging, and ultimately educating a child. Anything that runs counter to this purpose should be eliminated, as it is an impediment to the proper education of a child.
The quantity and quality of standardized testing in the United States, and specifically New Jersey, has reached epidemic proportions. I have informally estimated that given HSPA (still given to some students), PARCC, Student Growth Objectives (SGOs), and several other corporate intrusions into education, approximately ONE MONTH of instructional time is presently being sacrificed. While any decent teacher appreciates the importance of assessment- and we are very well trained on how to develop our own rigorous, yet realistic assessments- it should be the culmination of the educational process, but NEVER a substitution for it.
What concerns me even more greatly is my preoccupation regarding the motivations of the testing companies in their seemingly unending quest to deliver more and more tests into the hands of our students. It does not escape me that every one of these tests creates a profit point for these companies. I find myself deliberating over whether they are truly, sincerely, and deeply concerned about the welfare of our students, or rather the health and robustness of their own bottom lines.
Beyond this, here are some comments straight from students regarding the recent proliferation of high-stakes standardized tests in our classrooms:
"Taking these tests makes me feel stupid."
"I feel less motivated to learn."
"I used to like coming to school, but now I hate it."
Hearing these comments saddens me deeply. I appreciate their honesty, and I know where they're coming from, but as an educator, I know that WE HAVE TO DO BETTER by our students.
Our responsibility as parents, educators, and community members is to create and maintain vital, robust schools that challenge and support our students to develop and realize their potentials. Anything which interferes with this must be resisted and reduced. Ours appears to be the moral imperative to defend the sanctity and sphere of our neighborhood schools.
